| Notes |
- https://johnblakey.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/hair-5/
Obituary:
Eileen Joll, who has died aged 97, played a small role in the operation in which the RAF dropped into occupied France a spare prosthetic leg for the captured air ace Douglas Bader.
On August 19 1941 the then Eileen Sassoon Sykes, an ambulance driver attached to Roehampton Hospital in south-west London, was instructed to drive a prosthetic leg to No 18 Squadron at RAF Horsham St Faith, Norfolk . It was the first stage of the operation to deliver a replacement prosthetic to the legless Wing Commander Bader, who had been shot down on August 9 over northern France and had landed by parachute without his artificial right leg, which had been trapped in his downed aircraft.
The Germans offered safe conduct for a small aircraft to fly across France with a pair of spare legs, but this chivalrous offer was declined; instead the leg was dropped by parachute in the St Omer area during a bombing raid by the leading Blenheim of No 18 Squadron, escorted by Bader's Spitfire Wing.
Eileen Mary Sassoon Sykes, was born in Manchester on November 4 1916, the younger daughter of the millionaire cotton merchant Joseph Sassoon Sykes and his Australian wife, Marjorie Benjamin, first cousin of the composer Arthur Benjamin. Sykes, a member of a cadet branch of the Sassoon family, had been born in Baghdad and arrived in England in the early 1880s, becoming a prominent member of the Manchester Cotton Exchange and a highly successful proprietary merchant specialising in the international trade in tea, opium and cotton.
Shortly after the First World War, Sykes retired and moved his family to Nice on the Côte d'Azur, from where he dedicated the rest of his life to managing his wealth, playing golf and bridge, and assembling one of the great 20th-century collections of English furniture and clocks. Initially the family lived in the Hotel Negresco but, after four years Eileen's mother demanded that the family and its staff move into their own house.
Sykes duly acquired Villa la Sauvagère in the fashionable Nice suburb of Cimiez; the Aga Khan, a regular golfing partner of Sykes, and Charlie Chaplin were their immediate neighbours. At Villa la Sauvagère the Sykes family lived in considerable style, entertained lavishly and played host to many of the celebrities wintering on the coast, including Prince Aly Khan; Baron Nahum, the society and ballet photographer; and the stars of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, in which Eileen's first cousin Prudence Hyman (who danced under the name of Prunella Strogova) was a rising star.
At the age of eight Eileen was packed off to boarding school in Switzerland, and at 13 she was transferred to St Monica's School for Girls in Surrey, an institution thought by many of its alumni to be the model for St Trinian's. Arriving speaking better French than English, she loathed the school from her first day, and consoled herself with tennis. In the holidays she was taught to play golf by Walter Hagen, a skill she later refined under the tutelage of Henry Cotton.
In anticipation of a European war, in 1937 Sykes moved his family back to England, acquiring a large house in St John's Wood (now the residence of the Sri Lankan Ambassador), a country house at Cookham, Berkshire, and, later, a house in Beverly Hills, California. On the outbreak of war Eileen joined the Mechanised Transport Corps, a unique organisation whose lady members owned their own cars and wore a rankless uniform modelled on a Guards officer's tunic.
It did not take long for Eileen to tire of sitting outside government offices endlessly waiting for middle-ranking civil servants for whom the MTC acted as chauffeuses. In 1940 she traded in her smart uniform for the humble serge of an ambulance driver, working until late 1941 at the artificial limbs unit at Roehampton Hospital, and then with the burns unit at East Grinstead, where some of her pre-war friends were being treated.
After the war she married Ian Kenneth Sefton Joll, DFC, a Battle of Britain fighter pilot who, in 1944, had joined the staff of Lord Mountbatten's Combined Operations Staff, first in London (where he met Eileen) and then in Delhi. They set up home at Hurley, Berkshire, where they entertained a wide circle of friends, among them the actor Jimmy Edwards and the ballet stars Anton Dolin and Robert Helpman. Ian Joll died in 1977 after a long battle with cancer.
On her 90th birthday Eileen's children took her to visit the Battle of Britain Memorial on the Embankment and she quickly found not only the name of her late husband but also recognised the names of many former friends, regaling her party with heroic or salacious stories about them all.
She is survived by her son and daughter.
Eileen Joll, born November 4 1916, died February 5 2014
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English
1916 - 2014 (97 years) 
Has 2 ancestors and 2 descendants in this family tree.
Set As Default Person 
Abt 1867 - 1960 (93 years)
Sykes, Joseph Sassoon
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Joll, Squadron Leader Ian Kenneth Sefton DFC
